Narrow Road To The Deep North, The
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15
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Average rating4
Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. His life is a daily struggle to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from pitiless beatings. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever. Moving deftly from the POW camp to contemporary Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo and his comrades to those of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of love, death, and family, exploring the many forms of good and evil, war and truth, guilt and transcendence, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost. "From the Hardcover edition."
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If a masterpiece can be defined as the ability to poetically and unshrinkingly circle despair, hope and love and to find meaning there, Richard Flanagan has delivered us yet another of this class.
The cruel, torturous suffering and darkness is balanced by equally authentic evocations of love and light. The story unfolds with craftsmanship and care, and weaves between episodes of the protagonist's life in Australia, early and later, with the episodes of horror he experiences as a WWII POW labouring on the Thai-Burma Railway under the Japanese forces.
There were moments when I held my hand to my heart and gasped with joy at the lyricism and depth of Flanagan's prose, particularly when the words of Joyce and Basho are revered and their invocations - the invocations of high poetry - come to life in the emotions and lives of the so-real-you-can-almost-touch-them figures that feature in The Narrow Road to The Deep North”s pages.
The recurring motifs and orchestral storytelling, the lyricism, the literary nous and heft, the historical authority, the tender touch of personal connection, all converge to embody the living certitude that Flanagan himself is a poet, whose poetry is contained in a novel. This is his ode to what it means to live, love and hope. Ultimately, though it be sacrilege in the face of this book's complexity and beauty, if a message can be distilled, it is that to love is to hope, and to live is to hope, and it is this hope which must be the stuff of our being, what gives shape to our lives and animates them.
An irrevocable addition to the hall of Australian literary fame.
